“Fathering” Geology: Geology Comes to America! Available to Purchase

Chapter 4 shows how geology emerged from European American historic practices to become well established in the “New World” as a foundational modality of settler materialism. As geography was the primary science of imperialism, geology became the political science of empire and its settler claims. Within the context of American settler colonialism, white geology provided the material praxis and the geomythos of the populist science of white supremacy through geologists’ theories on race. The chapter demonstrates how white geology made the nation-state of America materially manifest as landscape, resource, and race, through geo-logics that conditioned the nation’s normative social forms and modes of settler (geo)power. As America grew its own geologic empire, these national modes of settler colonial materialism paradigmatically transformed extraterritorial extractive worlds across the globe. The racial “footnotes” of important European geologists are examined.